(’Self-Portrait (in cupboard)‘ by Claude Cahun)

“I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”

I was raised to believe that the use of cliché in critique was a sin worthy of social banishment, and the above phrase was one of many, along with the likes of ‘I always think champagne is rather overrated’ whose use would have you jeered into recognition of your hideous descent into the trite and unoriginal.

Reading extracts from the catalogue for ‘Newspeak: British Art Now‘  in this week’s Guardian, however, it is hard not to conclude that there are times when verbal sins committed in the name of originality can, at times, be more deserving of damnation that the worst excesses of cliché-speak.

Surely the purpose of the catalogue is to inform the viewer about the context in which the art was produced, to feed into the process of interpretation the reviewer’s own, hopefully intelligent observations, even to educate or entertain on a broader level, using the art as a basis for comment? If so, then the reviewer in this case appears to have written not so much a catalogue, as an unintentional parody of highbrow cultural criticism. A cursory scan of the first few google results from the search “extracts from art exhibition catalogues” produced numerous examples of catalogue entries that do all of the above, for example:

“…..By contrast, the experience (or perception) of confinement has provoked a more anxious response on the part of a number of Surrealist and contemporary women artists for whom the bourgeois home is seen as a constricting straitjacket. Some have sought to escape the rule-bound adult world by reverting to childhood. In the self-portrait photographs for which she is best known, the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun appears often to be play-acting or dressing up for the camera. Recalling a children’s game, for Cahun these strategies allow for a searching interrogation of gender and sexual identity. In ‘Self-Portrait (in cupboard)’ Cahun takes a nap on the shelf of a capacious wardrobe that dwarfs her, making her look like a small child. It seems probable that she is laying claim to the less socialised, correspondingly freer space of the child.”

or this, from the University of Dundee site:

“Before there was any earth or sea, before the canopy of heaven stretched overhead, Nature presented the same aspect the world over, that to which men have given the name of Chaos…” So begins Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its mythical tales of the magical transformations of gods and men into animal, vegetable and mineral forms. No classical text has had greater influence on the Western literary and artistic imagination than this collection of sometimes savage stories exposing the existential chaos beneath the surface of civilisation. The fact that we no longer read them could mean one of two things: either we’re too civilised to need them, or we’re in denial. The Greeks had an answer to both in the story of Pentheus, the priggish King of Thebes who doubted the power of the god of wine, Dionysus, and was torn apart by the god’s frenzied followers, led by his mother. Appropriately, this story is the subject of a painting by Paul Reid, the young Scottish artist described four years ago by Guy Peploe as “one of the most exciting painters to emerge from the primordial broth of postmodernism”. For the past eight years, Reid has been painting mythological subjects left untouched for more than a century. While his contemporaries, crushed by the weight of art history, have chosen the postmodernist way out, Reid has opted to play Atlas and shoulder the burden – a decision which, in art critical terms, makes him as much a freak of nature as the prodigies he depicts.”

Context, education, interpretation and comment, and not a juxtaposition of vomit and surf in sight.

(’Theseus and the Minotaur‘ by Paul Reid)

(‘Odysseus on the Island of Circe‘ by Paul Reid)